Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 14>

JC: So when did you leave the internment camp?

HS: Well, after I finished high school which was 1944, June of 1944, there's another tale to tell of my old high, old Lincoln High School for pre-college. You need to have foreign language, so I decided to take Spanish. I figured Spanish is easier than Latin or sounded easier than French. So my teacher was Mrs. Setum and I went through freshman and sophomore Spanish classes. But when we left Portland, that was April, the quarter wasn't completed, but Mrs. Setum gave me full credit for that quarter. So one day the principal at the high school in Minidoka that we called the Hunt High School because Hunt was the post office address for the camp, not Minidoka, called me in and said, "You know, Mrs. Setum from Lincoln High School sent you credit for that quarter of Spanish that you were unable to complete, but then that makes you eligible to graduate. So if you want to graduate this year, you can." So I said, "whoop-dee-doo." So I graduated ahead of the class of '45 that I would have normally graduated with. So anyway, thank you to Mrs. Setum for that. And that, I left camp to go to Ohio Wesleyan University, but Ohio Wesleyan University, they're on a semester basis. I think they started I can't recall, October, and so I decided to go to Cleveland, Ohio, to work for the summer and make some money to go to college, make more money than I did on the sugar beets, hopefully. But one of the big reasons I went to Ohio Wesleyan University is that even before I graduated from high school in the internment camp in Minidoka, one of my good friends, Minor Azuma, who lived in Block 32, kept talking to me about, What are you going to do when you finish high school? You need to go to college." You should do, he's like a big brother to me, and he kept talking to my parents. He said, "Shig needs to go to college," you know. But how am I going to go to college, don't have the resources, don't have the funding over there. So, no big worry. We'll work on getting a scholarship. Once you get there, you can work. So money shouldn't be all that much of a problem. You just have to decide to go to college. And so he was a big impact. He was on my first, our first sugar beet crew as well. And so he... and he had gone to Ohio Wesleyan University. He's a graduate of the University of Portland before internment and then he went on to Ohio Wesleyan, and I can't recall how long he was there, but he found his way there through Cleveland, Ohio, as well as going to Ohio Wesleyan which is in Delaware, Ohio, which is just north of Columbus, Ohio.

So, he was kind of a pioneer, and he introduced me to, in Cleveland by correspondence to Reverend Ward who he stayed with before going on to Ohio Wesleyan, and I did the same thing. I stayed with Reverend Ward in Cleveland, Ohio, before going on to Ohio Wesleyan. And also in Cleveland, Reverend Ward, my stay with him was a couple of weeks or so, I guess, because he had somebody else coming, and so he introduced me to a Reverend Seele who also, and these were Methodist ministers, and so I stayed within the Methodist church before I went to Ohio Wesleyan which is a Methodist affiliated college. So when, after I finished working in Cleveland and with the money that I had, I went to pay my tuition at Ohio Wesleyan, and everybody else was paying by check, you know. I had never heard of a checking account, so I pulled out my cash and started counting it out. I didn't know what to make it. I wasn't humiliated, but I guess I was kind of embarrassed. I didn't have a check to write.

But the curious thing, one curious thing, experience in Cleveland, Ohio, other people I've talked to find this very interesting that here I come from an internment camp where the army put me behind barbed wire under military guard and I went to work in a war plant in Cleveland, Ohio. This war plant had, curious product that they had is covers for portholes on navy ships, and you cut out these portholes from big slabs of steel and you have acetylene torches set up on a, follows a basic pattern, and once you light the acetylene torches and set the right temperatures, it's pretty automatic from there. But when the torches cut the portholes, and portholes drop on the floor, and then they're sent to some other destination to be finished, polished and finished. But in order to get them out of the, get those porthole covers out of the factory, somebody has to load them onto this thing that, and the crane picks it up and takes it away. Well, guess who did that work? And then these porthole covers, I don't know, thirty pounds, forty pounds, and put them in this steel thing, and you motion for the conveyor operator to come pick it up, and you hook up the bin with the lift and takes it away. So I loaded it up, hooked it up, told the guy to take it away. I guess I did an inexpert job because the thing slipped, fell right in front of me.

[Interruption]

HS: Well, at this war plant in Cleveland, also there was, oh, maybe half a dozen other Nisei working there. And I was on the what graveyard shift I guess, went to work about 5 o'clock and got out of there about 6 o'clock in the morning, 5 o'clock in the afternoon to 6 o'clock in the morning, so my day is kind of like topsy-turvy and, but still since it was 6 o'clock in the morning, when I went home, I would eat breakfast. Then before I go to work, I'd eat dinner. But I don't know, stomach didn't complain too much. But also in this war plant, cutting steel, sometimes, there's some sheets of steel that had to be tempered, temperature had to be brought up or warmed up or something like that, and these huge ovens. So one day, the foreman who was a Nisei says, "Hey, I want you to help me do this thing," and said, I'm going to put, turn the gas on for this oven, and when I tell you when, you light this newspaper up and throw it in. So I said, "okay, it's easy." So he turns on the gas, and then he says, "Okay," so I light up this thing and throw it in, and whoosh, there's too much gas in there. Fortunately, I was wearing a cap, but the thing hit me and singed my eyebrows, and I wasn't wearing glasses, but it singed my eyelashes together. And after that happened, he, immediately, the foreman comes up and says, "You okay?" I says, "I don't know. I can't see, I can't open my eyes," but took me into the office and sprayed my face with tannic acid which is good for relieving burns. The burn itself wasn't all that bad. It was a flash, but it was hot enough to singe my hair. But tannic acid turned my face purple. I guess I was a sight there for a while. But these days, I guess I could sue the company. But it was one of the hazards of working in the war plant. Later on at that plant, they let me be the conveyor operator. So if I wanted to drop something, I'd be the one I could drop it on somebody else. [Laughs] But it was a good experience.